The objective of this project is to test the hypothesis that the urban crisis is rooted in large measure in a shortfall of earned family incomes. We aim to document that a high proportion of workers in American cities cannot earn enough of a living to support a family at rock-bottom levels of decency. We also aim to show that this is not a matter of ill chance but part and parcel of the daily operation of the labor market. We propose to test a new area-wide aggregate measure of the shortfall in earned family incomes named "subemployment" and we hope to derive quantitative relationships between the estimates of this measure and observed social pathology in different cities. Finally, we intend to explore the relationship of subemployment in a city to the economic and social structure of that city. If the various aspects of our central hypothesis are borne out, we hope to integrate our quantitative results with earlier institutional studies into a discursive analysis of city structure, labor market stratification, subemployment, and social pathology.